Friday, December 02, 2005
It's not often I express sympathy for a star Liberal candidate. . .
. . . but you've got to feel a little sorry for Michael Ignatieff. First, he gets accused of making anti-Ukrainian comments in one of his books ("Isn't nationalism just an exercise in kitsch?" "Ukrainians now have a state, but are they really a nation?"). He says they're being taken out of context. I say they're not all that unreasonable even sans context.
Then he faces the music for the Liberal Party establishment's typically high-handed and anti-democratic behaviour (though to those who think that they were screwed out of a Liberal nomination, I say the same thing I always say: you think you're better than the guy carrying the Liberal banner? Run as an independent.), being heckled by a whole lot of plants at his nomination meeting, most of whom don't even appear to have been members of the constituency association.
Now he's facing the music for saying, of all things, that he'd like his old job back if he fails to get elected to this new one. His old job, see, is in Massachusetts and, apparently, running for Member of the Canadian Parliament doesn't just mean that you need to be Canadian, but that, even if you lose, you have to live and work in Canada for the foreseeable future. Or something.
I'd be no more likely to vote for Ignatieff if I lived in his riding than I would be to vote for any other Liberal in whose riding I happened to reside, and I find comparisons between Ignatieff and Trudeau to be more than a little sacrilegious, but I think the poor guy deserves a break.
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. . . but you've got to feel a little sorry for Michael Ignatieff. First, he gets accused of making anti-Ukrainian comments in one of his books ("Isn't nationalism just an exercise in kitsch?" "Ukrainians now have a state, but are they really a nation?"). He says they're being taken out of context. I say they're not all that unreasonable even sans context.
Then he faces the music for the Liberal Party establishment's typically high-handed and anti-democratic behaviour (though to those who think that they were screwed out of a Liberal nomination, I say the same thing I always say: you think you're better than the guy carrying the Liberal banner? Run as an independent.), being heckled by a whole lot of plants at his nomination meeting, most of whom don't even appear to have been members of the constituency association.
Now he's facing the music for saying, of all things, that he'd like his old job back if he fails to get elected to this new one. His old job, see, is in Massachusetts and, apparently, running for Member of the Canadian Parliament doesn't just mean that you need to be Canadian, but that, even if you lose, you have to live and work in Canada for the foreseeable future. Or something.
I'd be no more likely to vote for Ignatieff if I lived in his riding than I would be to vote for any other Liberal in whose riding I happened to reside, and I find comparisons between Ignatieff and Trudeau to be more than a little sacrilegious, but I think the poor guy deserves a break.
